Sacred Grove

A line of white-robed figures moves in slow procession toward a small flame burning at the foot of tall, dark trees. This is a sacred grove, the kind of walled-off wood that ancient peoples set aside for worship, where the trees themselves stood in for the temple. Böcklin returned to this scene more than once. He painted a first version in 1871 and another in 1886, and this one, from 1882, is the Basel picture. By then he was living in Italy again, in his fifties, and pulling further away from anything you could call a real place. No god is shown and no story is told, only the hush of people at a rite whose meaning has been lost. The fire at the tree line is the one bright note in the whole grove.